We’re verging on Superman territory here. In Child’s new novel, “Night School” (Delacorte), Reacher gets into a fight with a large group of neo-Nazis, and dispatches the first seven of them with no difficulty, needing a little help only with the eighth and final one. The bad guy seems impossible to defeat, but Reacher always defeats him. His expertise as a sniper is regularly called upon, often via the forensic question “How would you do it if you were the bad guy?” He routinely gets into fights with multiple opponents, confident in his maxim that “two against one is never a problem.” All the Reacher novels feature a climactic combat, sometimes against vastly superior numbers, sometimes against an opponent of superhuman size or strength or inability to feel pain, sometimes against all of the above. He is exceptionally good with all manner of weapons. Reacher isn’t just tough he’s supertough. The implication is that if members of Navy SEAL Team 6 get a little frisky Reacher is the guy who’s sent to make them simmer down. linebacker.) Why a military policeman? The explanation comes early in the first Reacher novel, “Killing Floor,” from 1997: (This is one reason that hard-core Reacher fans didn’t fall in love with the character’s cinematic portrayal by Tom Cruise, who has many virtues as an actor, none of which include being the same size as an N.F.L. He is a six-foot-five-inch former military policeman, whose weight fluctuates between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and fifty pounds, none of it flab. The element of wish fulfillment is embodied in the figure of Reacher himself. One of the great pleasures of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels is the immensely accomplished manner in which he balances wish-fulfilling fantasy and earthbound detail. On the other hand, I found the cascading sequence of horrors inflicted on Jude in Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” not too much to bear but too much to swallow-though a huge audience found a lot to like in the story of a baby abandoned beside the trash who grew up to be raped in a monastery before being variously kidnapped, raped again, pimped out, tortured in a basement, and crippled by being deliberately run over, en route to a lifetime of self-harm and eventual suicide. “Gone Girl”? Amazing Amy, perfect daughter and wife turned evil psycho and would-be murder-suicide, is only slightly less unlikely than the flying Kryptonian in tights, but the portrait has such glee and brio that, again, millions of us go along for the ride. This is wildly ahistorical, but for me and millions of other readers it both passes the Superman test and is a big part of what makes the books so enjoyable, and the main character so easy to like (as the real-life Cromwell, apparatchik and bureaucrat and religious ideologue, definitely wasn’t). In Hilary Mantel’s wonderful novels about Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist’s consciousness, perceptions, and psychology are entirely those of a modern man. The test doesn’t apply only to genre fiction, and it’s also the case that the point of maximum unlikeliness can be one of the best things about a fictional world. Mine is something that I call the Superman test: Is what I’m being asked to believe less likely than the character’s being able to fly?
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The question is not “Is it good?” but “Is this for me?” Most readers have their own standards for how much implausibility they can handle.
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This isn’t the same thing as aesthetic judgment-deciding whether a book is good as a work of art. The Jack Reacher novels deftly ground wish fulfillment in earthbound detail.